Do we really don’t have anything older before it that counts as a paid service/job being registered?
This reminds me an experiment made with capuchin monkeys, where the researchers were using small discs as some sort of currency. They could use it to buy stuff like pieces of cucumber (they eat it, but it’s meh), jell-o (they like it), grapes (they love it)…
One of the things that they reported is that a female exchanged sex for a disc. Then used said disc to buy a grape.
Conclusion: sex for goods is likely a human behaviour that predates humankind itself.
Or maybe it’s not really unique from other animals, we just have fictional currency and choosy morality. Every animal I can think of has the male doing all the courting work. Male spiders dance, birds sing and survive with brighter colors, bugs may lose their heads, giraffes punch females in the bladder to see if they’re even ready for sex, straight female prostitution drastically outweighs straight males, etc. It seems like the one who has to actually develop the offspring has the option to be much choosier. So did the capuchin prostitute herself or is that our morality being imposed on godless creatures who likely see no difference between sex, cleaning, or feeding each other as each is some type of need?
The capuchin engaged in sexual activity for payment, call it what you want but that pretty much the dictionary definition of prostitution. It’s not a moral or god question it’s semantics.
You can pay someone to pretend to be romantic on a date, to give you a massage, or to use their bodies for labor tasks. What exactly makes sex different?
Lmao godless The only difference between you & them is you got a stick up your ass
At no point was “godless” meant as an insult. I have no god. Doesn’t change the fact that a large portion of my definitions of moral behavior are rooted in my local dominant religion’s opinion.
If you take “job” to mean “doing a thing in exchange for another thing”:
Allow me to narrate a brief historical reenactment:
Caveguy:
dragging cavedeer carcus somewhere
Cavegirl:
happens upon the scene
grunting (translation: damn that venison lookin’ tasty af)
Caveguy:
grunting (translation: it’s mine you can’t have it)
Cavegirl:
grunting, but seductively (translation: well, if we smash, can I have some?)
Caveguy:
aroused grunting (translation: hell yeah girl, you can stick around, I’ve been having the worst dry spell)
fin
It’s not just us humans, chimps trade meat for sex: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chimps-behavior-sex-news-animals
Yale taught monkeys about money, and yup, they traded money for sex. From archive of NYT article:
Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.
That would make hunting/gathering the oldest profession, so that you have something you can trade for sex.
It depends on whether you’re considering “a profession” to be something that someone does to gain goods/services/“value” from another person, or from nature.
So a farmer isn’t a profession?
If the hunter/gather is trading food for sex, then they are doing to gain services from another person.
It’s a commentary on humanity and society.
There’s no records or evidence for the first jobs, so it’s mostly humor with a grain of truth. Most likely trading sexual favors for some benefit likely predates most other forms of trade (but it obviously depends on the exact definition of trade, profession, prostitution, etc.)
Because courtship rituals show up before money and across species usually involve the male providing food to the female to demonstrate the males fitness.
Long before language, money, and lots of other shit had been invented, males have traded resources for sex.
In some species the female stays with the young and is unable to get food for herself, she has to rely on her mate providing food or her and the baby die.
There was an experiment where the researchers introduced “money” to chimps that they could exchange for fruit treats. Some females almost immediately began trading sex for money
Well, yeah.
Food only lasts so long. Money could be stored and used later.
So the exchange became a much better deal. In effect the females were always hungry. Because they could exchange money for fresh food later.
Makes as well could save up money so they didn’t have to get food whenever they were horny.
It really streamlined the process, but long term I’d be interested to see what happened to fitness of the population. Like 4-4 generations down the line, would that population be significantly less fit than a control group?
Although that would likely have to be done in the wild where threats are and not in a safe enclosure.
